- Touch UI for scrubbing/scrolling contents faster.
- Dynamic shortcuts for most used commands that previously only accessible by using the keyboard.
[1] https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Us...
Also, dynamic shortcuts! Like the kind you get with BetterTouchTool[1]?
And all of the gestures were what the excellent touchpad was built to do anyway. Scrubbing? Gestures will do that.
It's like they put two giant touch interfaces on the device so that they could fight for attention, and the poor developer has to write two handlers for the two event sources, whilst it does the same thing at the end of it.
- Touch Bar is probably better on scrubbing/scrolling because you can actually see the zoomed out content, like the entire timeline of the movie on FCP.
- I haven't tried Boastr. I am sure it's useful and faster for pro. But on first look it's pretty complicated. It's not built in to the Mac and not easily accessible, especially for new user.
I don't do video editing or anything like that. My experience with a slider is pretty much limited to Netflix and such on my tablet :) Seems to work pretty well there. I can see how it might not work as well for fine-grained work. But that's an argument for touch screens in general, isn't it? Or do you think there's a distinction between Touch Bar and touch screen?
Caveat: On some video sliders, you can move vertically as well to increase/dilate the resolution of the horizontal movement. You won't have the same room with the touch screen. A couple options I can think of: use the track pad or a key press to modify the Touch Bar tracking; or perhaps track the speed of movement on the Touch Bar to modify the resolution, e.g., slower movement, higher resolution.
IMHO, as far as I understand it, Touch Bar is a bridge that connects the static nature of the keyboard with the dynamic nature of the screen. It is not intended to replace keyboard nor the screen. It is there to augment and extend them.
Touch bar is perfect for this job, considering:
- You can't beat the fast input from fixed keyboard + muscle memory.
- Touch screen on a laptop is really not ergonomic, your arm will get tired fast.
O' how I despise the new trackpads that aren't merely trackpad pointing devices, but also buttons, scrollbars and other bullshit I never wanted too.
Christ. I need to move the fucking mouse cursor. And, shit on me, I did not intend on fucking clicking or swiping anything, or an other absurdly tangential but obliquely imaginable bullshit, God damn it.
The worst is when you have to press the trackpad to click the button, and as your fleshy fingers flatten out against the trackpad, it registers the pressure center moving slightly, and so the pointer moves, and you click the wrong God damned thing because the trackpad IS the button.
It was better when the buttons were separate plastic divisions disconnected from the motion tracking area.
JUST MOVE THE CURSOR PLEASE.
In my experience, the fact that the trackpad no longer physically moves when you press down on it to click makes really cuts down on the problem of the cursor moving during the click, as does the greatly improved uniformity of the force required. Being able to adjust the force required to click is also quite nice.
I was never quite satisfied with Apple's hinged trackpads (or the standalone bluetooth trackpad with the click mechanism in the rubber feet) as a replacement for the physical button despite the trackpad size increase it enabled, but the latest generation strikes me as almost perfect.